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Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Men, Women and Children Adoption Movie Guide

Our lives are profoundly shaped by social media. We make
friends, communicate, find romance, and fight online. Paramount Pictures’ Men
Women and Children showcases how the lives of high school students and their
parents are enmeshed with the online world. One mother watches over her
daughter’s social media very intently. Both members of a struggling couple seek
affairs online. Pornography negatively impacts men and women, adults and teens.
Girls are subjected to online sites that promote unhealthy body image.

How’s This Relevant
to Foster Care and Adoption?

This isn’t so much relevant to foster care and adoption, so much
as it is relevant to parenting any teen or pre-teen. Foster kids and adopted
kids are, among other things… kids. And they grow up to be teenagers. And in
all likelihood, the internet will impact them. Kids who have been adopted or in
foster care may use the internet to search for their birth families or former
foster homes. They may use the internet to develop their sense of identity. On
the other side of those internet transactions are folks, some of whom are safe,
and some of whom are not.

Strengths

The film is surprisingly thoughtful, and offers a broad view
of the range of ways in which social media impacts the lives of teenagers and
their parents. Although it’s hard to see, the film also does a good job of
depicting a teenager’s spiral into depression and suicidality. It’s not a happy
movie – but it certainly is thought-provoking.

Challenges

There’s a lot of uncomfortable stuff in the movie, but the
movie thoughtfully shows realistic consequences and growth from lessons learned.
A mother exploits her teenage daughter by having her pose for racy pictures.
This is uncomfortable, even though the mother does eventually suffer
consequences. A father, desperate for pornography, uses his teenage son’s
computer. Both father and son are addicted to pornography, and both have
relationships that suffer because of it. An overzealous mother’s efforts to
protect her daughter drive her daughter’s boyfriend to attempt suicide. A girl is
invested in a website that promotes eating disorders; she eventually has a serious
health emergency. A boy is bullied by text message.

Recommendation

Men, Women and Children struck me as thoughtful, funny and
sometimes silly, in a 1980’s BBC Hitchhikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy sort of way. Social
media seems inextricable from the lives of most teenagers today, and this film
does a good of showing how that can be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s not a
movie for kids, and some adults will be put off by the well-earned R rating
(predominantly for sexual situations,) but for those adults who are open to it,
it’s worth seeing because of how thought-provoking it is in its exploration of
social media. Recommended for adults.

Questions for
Discussion

How can parents encourage their teens to process their sad
feelings without being overbearing?

How connected are each of your kids to social media? How
much does it impact their lives, self-image, and friendships?

How involved should a parent be in monitoring their kids’
use of the internet? How much is too much? How much is not enough?